ITSM moves out of the basement, into the house

We’ve seen some pretty major moves from ITSM vendors as the realisation that managing service for IT easily translates into managing any other sort of service delivery. In this vein, ManageEngine, which is a division of cloud applications vendor Zoho, is pointing to ‘changing dynamics’ in the service management sphere as it pushes to integrate its business applications with the service management ones.

Rajesh Ganesan, Zoho product management director, said that wherever service management is necessary, ITSM processes and tools can help. “Most service organisations and departments existed long before IT came into the picture and tend to have good structure and processes. ITSM, or more specifically ITIL, formalised the processes with guidelines, so tools got built and with the ability the customise the tools, IT organisations were able to automate their processes.”

It’s thanks to the tech savviness of IT organisations, said Ganesan, that these kinds of tools have become widespread, with the productivity and cost benefits being recognised by ‘other’ service departments and ride on top of the investments made by the IT teams.

“More non-IT teams are looking to not only leverage technology, but are starting to make their own technology decisions. It used to be the IT’s function to own all technology and tools that the entire organisation used, but with the cloud, marketing teams are happy to evaluate, make their own choice and independently use multiple tools like CRM, user behaviour tracking, surveys, reviews, analytics and more.”

He said similar trends are observed in sales, legal, administration and HR teams. “All these departments providing some sort of service to others; hence, having service management processes and tools is important.”

The good news, presumably for the vendors of the tools as well as those using them, is that a common instance can serve multiple organisational requirements, with separate portals for each team. “This single system of record for all service management engagement and operations is critical to run the overall enterprise operations efficiently,” said Ganesan.

As for those ‘changing dynamics’, he pointed out that ‘even enterprise technology is becoming mainstream’ and investment decisions are no longer made centrally. “Rapid changes in business models and the need for organisations to be agile and nimble call for decentralised operations, yet operating within a common framework. This framework is necessary to ensure common policy is defined and adhered to so all operations comply with regulatory standards and information security controls. This is where the IT team’s role is going up the value chain – from keeping the lights on to defining and enforcing policies and monitoring compliance.”